


you return, naked and alone

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Banter, Caretaking Fetish, Death Fetish, F/M, Risk Aware Consensual Kink, Temporary Character Death, Violent Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 08:08:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25347490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: Turkey and Iran enact a fetish scene only an immortal could. Written for equalityauction 2020.
Relationships: Iran/Turkey (Hetalia)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	you return, naked and alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yuuago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuuago/gifts).



> Written for equalityauction 2020, and thank you to my bidder for the donation! It was a pleasure to write for you.
> 
> Title from translated [Night Flower](https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/four-love-poems-iran) by Nader Naderpour.
> 
> For content notes, please read the tags.

"There was a time when you would have been confident you could win without tying me up to make sure," Iran remarked. She kept her shoulders loose and let Turkey cuff her hands together and through the headboard.

"Win in a fair fight, sure," Turkey said, and leaned an inch further over her shoulder so he could reach. "But sorry, sweetheart, I paid a lot of money for the picture windows in this place and I don't want you to tackle me through one to save face."

Iran turned her head to look out the closest glass wall. She could see the Bosphorus from here, water shimmering faintly in the sunset. It was a scenic location for a death, she thought, and suppressed a shiver. "Well, you have to admit it would be funny." 

Also he could use some incentive to redecorate. Turkey had closed up the Ottoman mansion decades ago. She hadn't minded the first version of the penthouse flat, which had been a sort of Baroque, French inspired layout, but now he had it done in stainless steel and tasteful minimalist decor, all flat colors and glass. It made her think of Japan, or worse, _America_.

"We're about fifteen stories up," Turkey said.

"You're going to kill me anyway, aren't you? It would be efficient." Actually Iran was fond of free fall as deaths went, but she was well aware this was a minority opinion. She had been called an adrenaline junkie in recent years, and a lunatic before.

"See, this is why I don't trust you," Turkey said, and locked the handcuffs for punctuation.

"You used to be such a drama queen. These days I have to go to Saudi for some decent oppositional grandstanding and _she_ is absolutely no fun at all." She had to concentrate to finish the line; Turkey was trailing his fingers up her arms and over her bare shoulders.

"How is it your people say shut up?" Turkey said pleasantly. " _Death._ " Before she could remark on that he kissed her, which proved if nothing else that he'd been sleeping with her long enough to anticipate.

And long enough to learn how to kiss.

She was already naked except for the tie at the end of her braid. Turkey was clearly wearing clothing he didn't mind the prospect of staining, jeans and one of the hoodies he wore when he was working with horses on his days off. Since the sheets under her were definitely real silk - she stretched against them, feeling the threads catch on the big scar down her back - she wouldn't take offense to that.

Her heart was already hammering and her breaths coming fast, and all Turkey had done was kiss her, and slip one of his hands down the side of her rib cage, calluses catching on her skin. He would barely have to touch her to get her off like this. She was deep in her head, wondering how he was going to do it and when. 

This wasn't the first time they'd done this, or something close to it, but it had been a while. Last time he'd killed her had been - oh - probably at Basra, entirely for real but disgustingly impersonal, he'd shot her in the chest. Guns were like that, hot enough if you had a thing for machinery but nothing to do with the person.

"Iran," Turkey said, and tugged on the end of her braid. "Are you with me?"

She told him to do something obscene with his horse, and he snorted, wrapped her braid around his fingers and pulled her head up to kiss her again. She tolerated this for a moment before nipping him, and gasped as he twisted a hand in the base of her braid.

"Behave," he growled. She heard cannons in his voice. For a moment she wanted nothing more than to throw him off the bed and kill him. Rage flooded her veins like oil in a pipeline, leaking out into the surroundings. Anger was next to arousal and always had been for her. Her head and her clit both throbbed. 

His hand slid between her legs, and he rubbed two fingers through her labia. She surged forward against him furiously, heat pulsing in her groin and pooling in her stomach, and the handcuffs clinked against the headboard and snapped taut. Turkey withdrew his hand an inch, just enough that she had to thrust her hips forward to maintain contract, straining for stimulation. She swore at him in a couple of languages and he laughed.

"I _hate_ you," she said, and he moved his hand again, cupping her and thrusting two fingers inside her, finally. She groaned, wrapping one leg around him for leverage and pushed back against him, grinding her clit into the heel of his hand. "Yes, God..."

"I thought you hated me," Turkey said. She could hear him smiling, so she kicked him and he groaned. "Never mind. C'mere." He pulled her hips up and she went willingly as long as he kept his hand working inside her, grabbing the headboard with her cuffed hands and arching her hips up away from the mattress. 

She was already prepared - it made this whole thing cleaner - so he didn't have to pull his hand away, he could thrust inside her ass immediately. She groaned, rolling her head back, eyes shut hard at the feeling. She'd already been so keyed up when they started - and she had almost forgotten why, but at the reminder her pulse went wild again - that it wouldn't take long. 

His fingers thrust into her again. She shifted the angle of her feet on the bed so she could push up against his hand, and then she came, bucking against him and nearly missed his hand move in the moment.

She wouldn't have - couldn't have - missed the scrape of metal as a blade was pulled from its sheath. She jerked, fighting the cuffs. Instinct prompted her to go for a sword she no longer carried, and she wrenched her shoulder instinctively trying to get loose. Turkey didn't cut her, not yet; instead he only laid the metal blade against her breastbone, the tip pointing up at the hollow of her throat. It was only a yatagan, not his real sword, with two feet of nearly straight blade. Of course the kilij would have been harder to hide. This might've fit under his hoodie, just barely. 

She was barely aware of him finishing inside her, only the coolness of the blade warming between her breasts. She rolled her eyes downward, straining to see if there was a maker's mark impressed in the blade.

"Your real one, isn't it?" she croaked as she recognized it. He had sent her a gift, once, from his favorite manufacturer. "I'm flattered you'd risk staining it."

"You should be," Turkey said. She was pleased to see that his eyes were half shut, and his speech grainy and cracked with arousal. His voice was wrecked by screaming over the sound of battlefields, and there was something in the knowledge that she could twist it further, could get under his skin now even with peace between them in a way she hadn't in all the Ottoman wars. "God, Iran--"

She opened her mouth to comment, but he wouldn't have heard it in his orgasm; and as he pulled his cock from her his hand closed over the yatagan's hilt. He angled the blade up for only an instant before he put his weight on the hilt, and the tip buried itself in her throat.

Good thrust, she thought, far away for an instant before the pain hit her. A clean kill.

It was an odd feeling, death, especially a quick death like this. Usually if you died in battle, you were either in so much pain you mostly noticed its absence; or you didn't notice you were hit until you fell over. He had angled the blade so it went through the major blood vessels, and she didn't have to wait to suffocate, so there was a scanty handful of seconds of consciousness: enough time to think _oh that's going to hurt in a minute_ and for her lips to part and struggle vainly to draw in a deep breath. There was enough time to see Turkey's face, intent above her, before her vision went dark and she was, for the moment, gone.

The blood spray hit him, hot like sea foam on a summer day. Iran blinked at him, silent for once in her goddamned _life_ , and he saw her open her lips, like she was going to say something. She always looked a little surprised, that he'd really done it, or that it had happened _then_ , whether he killed her in bed or in battle. Then he watched her face slacken and her eyes go dark.

Turkey let out his breath in a rush. He hadn't realized he was holding it. The yatagan fit in his hand like a glove, like he had been born holding a knife, and the imprints of his fingers were still worn into the bone hilt. He'd killed Iran with it before once, actually, but it had been a few centuries ago in a war somewhere and he doubted she remembered the particular weapon. 

He eased the yatagan out of her carefully, supporting the blade to make sure he didn't do any more damage by twisting it on its way out. Sure, he'd agreed to kill her - and stabbing Iran in the throat was probably a fantasy of most of the UN these days, the way she went on - but at this point any more damage would be superfluous. His knife was just a knife, and he would care for it later. Her body had been a living thing a few minutes ago and would be again in a matter of hours. 

The fact that she would never have let him take care of her this carefully conscious - would've laughed at him trying - was only one more reason to do it _now_ , when she couldn't protest.

He set the yatagan aside on the sheets, well clear of Iran, and stood up, hands trembling faintly. His jeans were clear of the blood spray, on the floor where he'd tossed them earlier; he pulled the hoodie off now, and the shirt under it. Both were stained by blood that had soaked through, and he tossed them on top of the knife. Then, carefully, he gathered Iran into his arms. 

She was tall enough to make it awkward, but skinny, lightweight for her height. Her throat would take hours to reconstruct itself. For now he supported her head carefully, not wanting to tear anything else loose in her neck. Blood had pooled in the hollows of her torso and throat; it dripped down her chest and her stomach onto the plastic he'd laid out on the floor earlier, and mixed with his semen over her thighs. His cock stirred a little at the sight, but she felt too much like a corpse in his arms to get too interested just now. He wanted to take care of her like this, unresistant as she was, more than he wanted to fuck her again.

He got her into the bathroom and set her on the tile floor, wincing at the angle her shoulder hit the floor at, but it wasn't like she could feel it right now. He turned the shower on first and jumped in himself, taking just enough time to get the blood off, before he turned the bathwater on and hauled her into the tub. 

"Supposed to do this outside, I guess," he said to her, taking a cloth from the basket on the side of the tub and starting to rub her skin clean of blood. "Neighbors would get a kick out of it. Ha, especially the part where you woke up, right? We could put it on Youtube," he went on, enjoying the ability to get a word in with her. "Fight over whether to call it a Turkish or Persian zombie..."

The corpse shifted angle in his arms and her head sunk under the water with a soft splash. "You always have to get the last word in," Turkey told her, but stopped his monologue there.

He had washed corpses before, both nations and humans who wouldn't wake up. It meant something - it meant _you_ meant something - to die in battle, or even in an accident or a poisoning or something, and wake up taken care of, with your family waiting, instead of tossed in a shallow grave or a pile somewhere. If this had been a real death of hers, the duty would have belonged to her sisters and female cousins first, but sometimes you were the only nation available for it. 

It could be eerie. The flat blankness when one of her eyes drifted open, the lifelessness of the body under his hands, led to the intrusive wonder if she would _really_ wake up, if this was _really_ safe. But her country was not exactly at risk of vanishing imminently. He squashed his worry and tried to focus on her silence, on the ability to do whatever he wanted, without her brushing him off. He kept his mind on the task. 

Once her body was clean, he propped it up and took his time over every individual snarl in her long black hair. It was very black, spread out over the white edge of the bathtub. As far as Turkey remembered this was the longest her natural hair had been in her life; before, when she had to work with cavalry instead of computers, she had generally augmented it with horse hair. It could be trance-like; he lost all sense of time and had to get out of the bathtub to check the clock when he was done washing it.

He had about an hour until rigor mortis risked becoming a problem, if it was going to make an appearance this time; it didn't always, with nations. He wanted her in bed before that. Turkey pulled the plug and let the water drain, then reached for the camphor oil to use next. 

He started rubbing it into her hands, thinking of how much they had changed. The callouses from reins and sword and bow were almost gone, although she still had, fainter now, wear from riding horses. Computers and pens left no mark on her hands, left them as soft as a human woman's. There weren't even ink stains, but she still kept her nails clipped short. He raised her right hand and kissed the back, then pressed her knuckles to his cheek and closed his eyes, inhaling camphor. He imagined what she would say, and the caustic expression on her face, if he kissed her hands while she was awake. Then he went back to his work.

The bed they had used in the guest room was still a mess. He'd forgotten about it, worrying about Iran herself. He groaned at the sight and carried her past the doorway into his own room, laying her out on the sheets and spreading her hair so that it would dry faster. It trailed over the western-style headboard, falling most of the way to the floor. He checked on her throat, decided the damage hadn't changed much yet. He had time to go take care of the blood in the bathroom and the guest room, without worrying that she'd wake up poorly cared for.

There was an odd loneliness to the process of bagging the ruined sheets and the plastic laid out on the floor, going to get the stain remover stuff for the mattress under them. He lived alone, and was used to being alone no matter how often he dreamt about the days of the empire when his house had always been full. But having a corpse in the house made the absence gnaw. It was no longer a general loneliness but a specific lack of Iran. She should've been sniping at him, or making a production of getting dressed and fixing her makeup and probably sniping about him ruining it, after sex. Once a few years back she had stolen his laptop and insisted on lying in his bed for more than an hour, still naked, while she set up a VPN and encrypted browser for him. 

This particular absence disturbed him as much as it fascinated him. He looked into the bedroom quickly to see that she was still there, and still slack and lifeless.

Cleaning up the apartment didn't take that long, he'd been prepared for the mess. He went back to his bedroom and dressed her body. He didn't use a real shroud because this wasn't a real death, and because she would have to move in whatever he left her in when she woke, but he still chose white. Her jaw was stiffening, but her limbs were still limp and pliable, so he could do it.

When he was done, he leaned over and kissed her lips, chaste and gentle. It was the way she wouldn't let him kiss her when she was awake; the way he had kissed his wives, once, when there wasn't time or interest for anything else. He stroked the side of her cheek, thought about how rare it was to see her without a heavy layer of makeup. There were a few freckles by the corner of her eye that he never normally saw, and her natural eyelashes were thin and wispy. He fantasized about this face, often, about being with her in the morning before she made herself up, about an Iran who didn't hide from him, but mostly he had the sense to know it was a fantasy. Marriage was... difficult for their kind, particularly marriage without political union.

Turkey shook off his thoughts and went to get the lamps and keep them burning, until she woke. The flickering light played tricks with her skin and her face, making them look alive one moment, eerily distorted the next. He went to get his book and a chair to set beside the bed, and as though she was only resting, and as though she could hear him, he began to read aloud.

The first breath felt like acid in her mouth. Her throat rasped, stiff and newly-healed, and her heart shuddered back into movement. She was hideously aware of the passage of blood through her veins before she knew who she was, where she was, that she was awake and alive (again).

Iran had died too many times to be shocked by the experience. She didn't open her eyes or try to move and risk failing, only lay limp on the bed, letting her body wake and her systems shudder back into motion the way a human body wasn't designed to as they restarted. Her heartbeat slowly regularized and slowed, her breaths became even, although her throat was still raw, until she could think, _okay_ , what happened _this_ time?

There was a little sting of disappointment, too, once she understood that she had been dead and wasn't, anymore. Here she was again, alive; here she was again, outliving the world of her birth, unable to join all of the nations her age who had already gone.

Though dying now would have been unfair to Turkey, she thought, as memory at last connected. No wonder her throat felt raw. 

Her skin was clean and the cloth of the dress and the sheets was soft against it; silk again. She could feel her hair, spread out around her. The smell of camphor mixed with rosewater in the air and covered or was untainted by blood. Turkey had either traumatized his maid or finally learned to clean.

She wiggled her toes and fingers, assuring herself that the waking was finished and she could move them, and she opened her eyes.

The windows were dark, city lights distant, but the room was lit up by lamplight. Night time; she wondered if it had been twelve hours or thirty-six, or more. She rolled her shoulders and turned her head. Turkey was sitting in a chair by the bed, reading. She thought at first he hadn't noticed until he said, "Welcome back."

"Peace to you," she said after a moment, voice rasping. "Damn it--"

He was already moving, picking up a glass from the night stand and holding it for her. She accepted it this once, since she had to be able to talk to snap at him, and drank water from it. "--Goodnight, then," she said again, swallowing again. "How long has it been?"

"About a day and a half. You had me worried over the first night, it took a while for your throat to fix itself."

"Well, you had to be so dramatic and totally destroy it," she said. "--Oh, don't look at me like that. I didn't die. There's always next time."

Turkey sighed. She ignored it and sat up, slowly, head pounding with low blood pressure. "Did you keep the lamps burning the whole time? You romantic," she said, and leaned over to kiss him. "You can plan the real funeral too when it comes, if you like."

"Iran, don't speak," Turkey said, and fisted a hand in her loose hair. He _did_ like her hair. Her heart was starting to speed up, body waking up enough to respond. 

It was faster - less painful - if you were taken care of, and it didn't have to do too much extra work. She had died too many times to count, mostly on battlefields where reclaiming the dead quickly wasn't realistic. It was a novelty to wake up safe and cared for, and something to remember the times when she didn't. She appreciated it more than she was likely to express, especially to Turkey, who _didn't_ need the encouragement.

"Here," he murmured after a moment, pulling back, and turned to take a dish off the table.

Halva. Oh. "Is this so I know that I died?" she asked, and he laughed helplessly. "--No, I mean, thank you," she said, taking it and closing her eyes. "Is this homemade? You've learned to cook, too?" She tasted rosewater and saffron, and felt her shoulders relax at the same time as tears stung her eyes briefly. Halva brought up a thousand other funerals for her, but then it also _would_ raise her blood sugar quickly, which was as good for a nation who had just died as for mourners. 

"Somehow I didn't expect you to get as far as the food," she said, and insistently took the cup herself to drink that time, although her hand still shook.

"I _have_ died," he muttered, looking away. "I know what waking up feels like."

Sometimes he seemed embarrassed by his own affection for her. She suspected this of motivating the whole fetish for death; it would be easier to express his fondness if she wasn't in the room while she received it. She kept eating, but moved closer to bump her shoulder against his chest, and let him wrap his arms around her. 

"How was the blood spray?" she asked, when her head felt clearer. "Did you get the windows?"

She could feel him rolling his eyes behind her, even as he kissed the top of her head. "Yeah, I didn't think that one through. I'm going to have to get out the ladder to get the blood off the ceiling."

"Serves you right stabbing me in a room with white walls." She licked her fingers when she was done and leaned back against him. "I thought for sure you'd go with strangling me or something."

"Knife's cleaner. Faster." He ran his fingertips over her scalp and she shivered at it. "You're still weak, aren't you."

"How'd you know?" The dizziness did make itself plainer when she closed her eyes. 

"You're nowhere near combative enough." He kept petting his hair even while she twitched at that. "It's alright, Iran. You don't have to get up. Just... leave it."

"Okay, this once," she agreed with a sigh, and closed her eyes to rest against him. 

She slept for a while; when she woke up he was asleep, too. She rose, disentangling herself, and kissed his forehead and the lids of his closed eyes; then she went to get her makeup case from her bag.

**Author's Note:**

> It wouldn't be Hetalia smut without footnotes, so:
> 
> I had an interesting time reading about Iranian [funerary traditions](http://www.iranchamber.com/culture/articles/rituals_of_death.php) in more detail for this fic. (I used a few other pages as well but on consideration decided not to link to personal blog pages on this fic in case their owners track traffic sources.)
> 
> A [yatagan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yatagan) is a kind of Ottoman knife.
> 
> Why Iran [lectures Turkey](https://vpnoverview.com/unblocking/censorship/internet-censorship-iran/) about [internet security](https://ooni.org/post/iran-internet-censorship/).


End file.
